TY - CHAP

T1 - “IF I BROKE DOWN THE WALL OF FLESH”

T2 - Blurring the Human/Animal Distinction in the Slaughterhouse through Ivano Ferrari’s Poetry

AU - Stefanoni, Chiara

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2025 selection and editorial matter, Gwen Hunnicutt, Richard Twine and Kenneth Mentor; individual chapters, the contributors.

PY - 2024/11/12

Y1 - 2024/11/12

N2 - If it is true that the slaughterhouse is an institution that remains “hidden in plain sight’, as argued by Timothy Pachirat, this chapter proposes to enter it through the words of Italian poet Ivano Ferrari, author of the collection Slaughterhouse, written during his employment as a worker in Mantua’s slaughterhouse. The chapter employs the framework of the indistinction approach to the animal question as theorized by Matthew Calarco to analyze Ferrari’s poems and highlight their antispeciesist potential. Through this lens, first, Ferrari’s writings reveal how violence is differentially and intersectionally distributed onto human (workers) and non-human (animals) bodies inside the slaughterhouse. Second, with a complementary move, attention is given to those poems unveiling trajectories that suspend the perpetuation of the human/animal distinction and speak of shocking reductions, of violent experiences dismantling human privilege and giving awareness that humans too are flesh and meat. Ferrari is labeled “poet of indistinction”, and it is claimed that his poems sing both the dimension of vulnerability with its ambivalence between unchecked violence and gateway for a non-anthropocentric ethos of care and compassion, and the dimension of potentiality, manifested in animal resistance and animal word, which enable a zoopoétique reading of his work.

AB - If it is true that the slaughterhouse is an institution that remains “hidden in plain sight’, as argued by Timothy Pachirat, this chapter proposes to enter it through the words of Italian poet Ivano Ferrari, author of the collection Slaughterhouse, written during his employment as a worker in Mantua’s slaughterhouse. The chapter employs the framework of the indistinction approach to the animal question as theorized by Matthew Calarco to analyze Ferrari’s poems and highlight their antispeciesist potential. Through this lens, first, Ferrari’s writings reveal how violence is differentially and intersectionally distributed onto human (workers) and non-human (animals) bodies inside the slaughterhouse. Second, with a complementary move, attention is given to those poems unveiling trajectories that suspend the perpetuation of the human/animal distinction and speak of shocking reductions, of violent experiences dismantling human privilege and giving awareness that humans too are flesh and meat. Ferrari is labeled “poet of indistinction”, and it is claimed that his poems sing both the dimension of vulnerability with its ambivalence between unchecked violence and gateway for a non-anthropocentric ethos of care and compassion, and the dimension of potentiality, manifested in animal resistance and animal word, which enable a zoopoétique reading of his work.

KW - Cultural studies

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85208861051&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.4324/9781003441908-21

DO - 10.4324/9781003441908-21

M3 - Chapter

AN - SCOPUS:85208861051

SN - 9781032579771

SP - 236

EP - 248

BT - Violence and Harm in the Animal Industrial Complex

A2 - Hunnicutt, Gwen

A2 - Twine, Richard

A2 - Mentor, Kenneth

PB - Taylor and Francis Inc.

ER -